"I think they're great," Chris Martin said of Nickelback during a radio interview last month. Different strokes and all that, but the Coldplay singer could hardly have picked a less lovable group to champion. The hilarious, parodic single Rockstar excepted, Nickelback's music reaffirms every sex-and-stupidity cliche hard rock can offer. (Chad Kroeger, the band's main dude, has even said that this album, the followup to their 10m-selling All the Right Reasons, was nearly titled Sex and Drinking.)

One or another of those subjects finds its way into most songs here; if Kroeger isn't lusting after "the hottie with the million-dollar body", he's ingesting "a fistful of whiskey", and so on. And on. He sings like it hurts; perhaps pitting his effortful wheeze against his band's pub-rock riffage is harder than it sounds. Alternatively, despite having made it his life's work to celebrate idiocy, maybe he is actually embarrassed.